Carbon Footprint Estimation in a University Campus: Evaluation and Insights

Abstract

Background: The University of Talca (UT), since 2012, has been annually tracking the carbon footprint (CF) based on the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol for all its five campuses. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the trajectory for determining the CF on campuses and identify the stressors. Methods: GHG protocol separates emissions into three scopes—1) direct; 2) indirect; 3) other indirect emissions. This study reports the emissions on the Talca campuses that are related to Scopes 1 through 3. The data is closely studied to draw inferences on the factors most affecting CF and recommend improvements. Results: The estimation of the CF in Scope 1 and Scope 2 were 2 0.03 tCO2e and 0.25 tCO2e per person per year, respectively. Results show Scope 3, which measures indirect emissions generated by activities like transportation of people, produced the highest contribution of 0.41 tCO2e per person to the UT’s CF in 2016. Conclusions: The study strongly suggested that transportation of students and faculty to and from the campus is one of the main stressors. The study of the main campus of Talca to quantify the CF is of immense value to institutions of higher educations as it provides a guideline and a comparative metric for other institutions.

Determining the 2019 Carbon Footprint of a School of Design, Innovation and Technology

“…One of the objectives of this methodology is to define parameters of comparability, not only for an installation or product over time, but on a comparative level between similar ones in such a way that it facilitates decision-making on the choice of study centers as well as contributing to the reduction in these effects. The following activity rates are proposed for weighting CF, depending on the number of users, hours of use and surface area in order to facilitate the comprehension of the client's or user's contribution to GHG emissions: kgCO 2 -e/m 2 , kgCO 2 -e/student or kgCO 2 -e/student•hour [30][31][32][33]. The use of the kgCO 2 -e per student assessment is justified as it is an objective measure for comparison and will serve as a verification ratio of the improvements adopted.…”

Energy Management Strategy in Campus Towards a Green Campus Through Promoting Carbon Footprint and Energy Efficiency Index Improving

“…For that reasons, some researchers have proposed approaches that can be used to reduce CF on campus, including through improvements in electrical energy management, (Yañez et al, 2020;Ravindran and Selvaram, 2016), the application of new renewable energy on campus (Chowdhury et al, 2018;Hasapis et al, 2017;Shukla et al, 2019) or the integration of EBT on campus (Maritz, 2019), water and waste use management (Yañez et al, 2020)., transportation (Wu et al, 2017;Liu et al, 2017;Yañez et al, 2020), building materials (Wu et al, 2017). Ravindran and Selvaram (2016), promoting greening for carbon absorption on campus (Ravindran and Selvaram, 2016), Pablo Yañez et al (2020) believe that student transportation activities on campus are a significant stressor in the problem of carbon emissions (Yañez et al, 2020). Li et al (2015) found that, on average, students produce 3.84 tons of CO2, which consists of 65% daily activities, 20% transportation, 15% academic activities (Li et al, 2015).…”

Comparative Assessment of Carbon Footprints of Selected Organizations: The Application of the Enhanced Bilan Carbone Model

“…The CF calculation for the University of Indonesia recognized electricity consumption as the main emission category [31]. On the other hand, the calculation of the CF of the university campus in Chile suggested that the transportation of college students and employees to and from the campus is the main source of emissions [32]. The application of different CF calculation approaches, together with a different set of input activity data and emission factors, gave the results that were not comparable.…”